Crimson staff writer

Kevin T. Wittenberg

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I try not to drop the T-bomb if I can help it. I get on just fine by saying I have three siblings and letting people’s polite interest in my past be satisfied. Months or even years later, it’ll slip in by accident. People who think they know me inside and out discover that I am an entirely different personn—that they’ve never known the real me. At least, you’d think so based on their reaction when I say, “Yeah, I was skyping the other night with my twin—oh shit.”

Many millenials have had the inauspicious pleasure of watching Miley Cyrus’ VMA performance. Well, performance is a strong word. For six minutes, hell was recreated on stage with all the attendant teddy bears and rasping attempts at singing. But the piece of the Miley experience that had people up in arms screaming over social media was her twerking, a word which largely hadn’t entered our vocabulary until the ex-Disney starlet graphically displayed its meaning on national television.

While the age discrepancy is small, the gap between a prefrosh and a Harvard student is large. With their red Visitas folders and herd mentality, prefrosh spent the past weekend walking around Harvard Yard with wide eyes and dangling lanyards. It is easy to forget that that was us a few years ago. From living at home and taking AP tests to living in dorms and pulling all-nighters, how can a high school senior smoothly make the transition?
Silas M. Farley is an ordinary prefrosh: naive, confused, and still immersed in high school. Can he discover his inner Ivy Leaguer and be MADE into a Harvard student?

Boards covered in Post-It notes have appeared in the Science Center lobby, entreating passersby to scribble down something they love. The notes feature messages about family, friends, locations, and food, among others. Part social project, part happiness booster, the initiative was started by Harvard College Faith and Action and encourages individuals to share their passions with the world.

Although there was a brief scare last year when researchers thought that neutrinos had broken the speed of light, the laws of physics haven't thrown our conceptions of speed many curveballs in the past year. Until a few days ago, that is. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that there might be planets which tear across the universe at many millions of miles per hour. In a paper to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers Idan Ginsburg, Avi Loeb, and Gary Wegner confirm the possibility of these "hypervelocity planets."

Most of us—most—will never be selected to participate in the Hunger Games. Luckily for everyone else, there's still a higher calling to represent our Districts in a nobler and less lethal sport: the Drinking Games.

More valuable than the breathtaking vistas and the time spent with friends around the campfire was the rekindling of childhood spirit, of instinct, of passion.
Clambering around nature’s jungle gym evoked a sensation I hadn’t felt since childhood. It came from some part of me wholly disconnected from the intellectual rigor of college; it was something visceral, something I’ve only felt when risking my life. It was a fearlessness that throughout my childhood was curbed by my parents’ fears; now it was tinged with unadulterated freedom. There was nothing but handhold after handhold. Foothold after foothold. The abyss. The sky.